Variant · Low-Medium

CWE-157: Failure to Sanitize Paired Delimiters

The product does not properly handle the characters that are used to mark the beginning and ending of a group of entities, such as parentheses, brackets, and braces.

CWE-157 · Variant Level ·3 CVEs ·4 Mitigations

Description

The product does not properly handle the characters that are used to mark the beginning and ending of a group of entities, such as parentheses, brackets, and braces.

Paired delimiters might include:

Potential Impact

Integrity

Unexpected State

Mitigations & Prevention

General

Developers should anticipate that grouping elements will be injected/removed/manipulated in the input vectors of their product. Use an appropriate combination of denylists and allowlists to ensure only valid, expected and appropriate input is processed by the system.

Implementation

Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across relat

Implementation

While it is risky to use dynamically-generated query strings, code, or commands that mix control and data together, sometimes it may be unavoidable. Properly quote arguments and escape any special characters within those arguments. The most conservative approach is to escape or filter all characters that do not pass an extremely strict allowlist (such as everything that is not alphanumeric or white space). If some special characters are still needed, such as white space, wrap each argument in qu

Implementation

Inputs should be decoded and canonicalized to the application's current internal representation before being validated (CWE-180). Make sure that the application does not decode the same input twice (CWE-174). Such errors could be used to bypass allowlist validation schemes by introducing dangerous inputs after they have been checked.

Real-World CVE Examples

CVE IDDescription
CVE-2004-0956Crash via missing paired delimiter (open double-quote but no closing double-quote).
CVE-2000-1165Crash via message without closing ">".
CVE-2005-2933Buffer overflow via mailbox name with an opening double quote but missing a closing double quote, causing a larger copy than expected.

Taxonomy Mappings

  • PLOVER: — Grouping Element / Paired Delimiter
  • Software Fault Patterns: SFP24 — Tainted input to command

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CWE-157?

CWE-157 (Failure to Sanitize Paired Delimiters) is a software weakness identified by MITRE's Common Weakness Enumeration. It is classified as a Variant-level weakness. The product does not properly handle the characters that are used to mark the beginning and ending of a group of entities, such as parentheses, brackets, and braces.

How can CWE-157 be exploited?

Attackers can exploit CWE-157 (Failure to Sanitize Paired Delimiters) to unexpected state. This weakness is typically introduced during the Implementation phase of software development.

How do I prevent CWE-157?

Key mitigations include: Developers should anticipate that grouping elements will be injected/removed/manipulated in the input vectors of their product. Use an appropriate combination of denylists and allowlists to ensure onl

What is the severity of CWE-157?

CWE-157 is classified as a Variant-level weakness (Low-Medium abstraction). It has been observed in 3 real-world CVEs.